The Last Airbenderis a weird movie. It is a bad movie. But it is the kind of movie you can enjoy if you’ve read other critics’ reviews and found out its flaws ahead of time. It is also the kind of movie that benefits from you being drunk.

Other critics – ones with more prestigious publications than this blog – have said that The Last Airbenderis rushed, and too quickly paced. They have said that it suffers from stilted dialog with too much exposition, and that this dialog is often poorly delivered by bad child actors.

They are right on all counts. But the movie isn’t quite as bad if you know these things going in. Especially if you have had several beers and/or joints beforehand.

The movie takes place in a weird world where there are four nations representing the four elements dictated by stupid Greek people – fire, earth, water, and air. The story is about this bald white kid Asianly named Aang who is found by some white kids from the water tribe. In this story, the different nations can each for some reason manipulate their respective elements, except for one being called an Avatar who can manipulate all of them. Aang is almost definitely the latest Avatar, and I’m sick of giving exposition already.

The movie gives this exposition. The critics are right that the exposition is overlong, and that the child actors delivering it don’t know how to act. They are right in saying that the movie’s pace is too quick because it attempts to summarize a twenty-episode cartoon series in less than two hours. Certainly the movie has a cartoony feel to it.

What is weird is that the movie is less than two hours long. It didn’t need to be. For the money he was budgeted, writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan could have made the movie maybe half an hour longer, and then the pace wouldn’t have been so rushed.

But the other critics have said the movie’s too-fast pace and excessive exposition made it incomprehensible, which it is not. The movie is based on an Anglican anime-style cartoon by Nickelodeon. I have only seen a few episodes of that cartoon, but I still understood what was going on in the movie. It was a fantasy tale about primal elements and their balance.

And it was visually gorgeous. The other critics knew that. But they deemphasized how awesome the special effects were. They deemphasized how brilliant the composition of the cinematography was. Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan has always been a better director than a writer. He has always been better at visual composition than working with actors. In his past movies, he’s had better actors to make up for these flaws. The Last Airbenderemphasizes his strengths and flaws more than his previous productions.

Shyamalan does amazing visual work with camera focus, left-to-right composition, long shots, close-ups, and whatnot. The scenes where the characters do their “bending” of the elements feature a dance like martial arts and brilliant special effects. These are beautiful. If you’re drunk enough, maybe you won’t notice that the story isn’t so great.

There have been two other major criticisms leveled at The Last Airbender.

The first is that the 3D, which was converted from 2D film, sucks. The obvious answer to this problem is to see the movie without the 3D gimmick. I saw the movie in 2D and it looked gorgeous. Maybe someday movie studios will realize that audiences don’t want to see bad 2D-to-3D conversions.

The other major criticism is that M. Night Shyamalan is racist because he cast white people in the lead roles, contrary to the races of these characters in the Nickelodeon cartoon. This is a stupid criticism because Shyamalan – as you might have guessed from his last name – is Indian himself. He cast the villains from the Fire Nation as Indians. Either this is an case of self-hatred on a race level, of Shyamalan cast race-blind. Either way, this shouldn’t be an issue to white critics.

What is more an issue is that Shyamalan cast most of the prominent Indian actors working today. There aren’t many. This means that he cast Dev Patel – who you remember from Slumdog Millionaire– as the lead villain. And he cast Cliff Curtis and Aasif Mandvi as the other two prominent villain roles. Aasif Mandvi is one of the latest correspondents on The Daily Show. For liberal white people like myself, it’s hard to take him seriously as a bad guy in a big budget, overbloated fantasy production.